The Effect Of Integrating Drama Activities With English Teaching In Senior High School

The effectiveness and efficiency of classroom teaching has always been the pursuit of teachers.The time of English classroom teaching is mainly occupied with the using of the textbooks that fulfill the requirements of the English curriculum standards in the form of texts with necessary knowledge points to be taught to students.In many senior high schools,English teachers spend a lot of time and energy in listing numerous knowledge points which come directly or derive from the textbooks for their students to learn and master,followed by countless related exercises.In the end,however,as is vividly shown in students? examination paper,the knowledge points often turn out to be easily and quickly out of students? mind and students? comprehensive English competence doesn?t improve as expected.What is more,the teaching process stuffed with the presentation of knowledge points and the explanation of exercises deprives the students of their interest in learning English and produces many other negative results which are far from the requirements of the English curriculum standards.This research bears the view that the integration of drama activities with English teaching in senior high school is one of the feasible solutions to the problem.There are plenty of research findings for teachers to refer to on the adoption of drama activities in the English teaching of elementary and junior high schools,but few are available for that of senior high schools.The subjects of this research were the students of two parallel classes in a senior high school in Shanghai.One of the two classes was experimental class and the other control class.The teaching method featuring drama activities was adopted in the experimental class.The experiment lasted for one term.The research was designed to go as follows: The observation was conducted on the adoption of drama activities in the daily English teaching of the experimental class;some qualitative and quantitative approaches such as examinations,questionnaires,interviews etc.were employed to collect relevant data and the data were analysed statistically.The research results indicate clearly that the integration of drama activities with English teaching in senior high school not only plays a propellent role in the English teaching of senior high school but also benefits the students a lot in an all-round way.The results are mainly as follows.It helps to improve students? interest in English learning and promote students? development in their comprehensive abilities,such as their English competence,imagination and creativity,the abilities of analysis and appreciation,the organizing and performing abilities,communication and cooperation abilities and good personalities: the students are more open-minded,more conscious of their own shortcomings and more willing to overcome their weak points,more confident about themselves and so on.At the same time,based on the theoretical and empirical study,this thesis explores the concrete ways to combine drama activities with senior high English teaching and gives some teaching cases.